Justifing Abortion

Painfully stupid “10 reasons to have an abortion”

By Dave Andrusko
A tip of the hat to a recent post at LiveActionNews for reminding me that I never responded to an awful abortion advocacy piece that ran last year on a website called Mommyish. The author, Eve Vawter, listed “10 Reasons to Have an Abortion”
Oh, I forgot to add the full title: “10 Reasons to Have an Abortion—illustrated by adorable cats.” I am not kidding.

Each of the “reasons’ (“reasons” is to give Vawter’s words more intellectual heft than they deserve but…) accompanied by a different cat or cats with differing expressions. I could obviously spend time on this bizarre juxtaposition but won’t.

Clinton Wilcox, writing at secularprolife.org, did a very nice job in debunking the inanities in the list, which actually was pretty much exhausts the entire list.

Most of the reasons beg the question—the question being if the unborn child is a human being (what else would she be?), then it matters not if you believe the child is an inconvenience or that you are too old or too young or that the baby would put a crimp in your career plans. These justifications are simply not commensurate with the gravity of the tradeoff—ending a defenseless human being’s life.
Or the reason/justification is simply preposterous. In today’s world, are women really peering at a world population clock and deciding they will off their child because children are being born elsewhere at a rate they disagree with? Fear of “overpopulation” is, at best, hollow, at worse, embarrassingly, painfully silly.

Or that the woman has no relationship with the baby’s father. Next to question-begging, this is the most curious reason. One acts immaturely, with no view or concern with the consequences, and when a baby is conceived you double back and say, “I hardly knew the guy.” How is that the child’s fault?
And aren’t mature, adults what feminists says every woman should aspire to become and be recognized for? Or is what they really are advising/rationalizing is a kind of perpetual adolescence?
Reading the back and forth at the Mommyish website is fascinating. My favorite (so to speak) is

I would have been perfectly happy to have had my mom abort me if that is what she had wanted. It was her human right, regardless of men’s laws. I never would have known the difference.

I assume the writer is semi-serious. Would she have “known the difference” at birth + one day? Of course not. If someone’s grandfather has advanced Alzheimer’s, would he “know the difference” if you poisoned him?

Last thought. A line of affirming responses begins (and ends) with the declaration that while the unborn child has no intrinsic rights, at the magical moment (birth), he/she MAY acquire rights but who knows. Why the hesitation?
Because the foundation on which so many of the pro-abortion responses rests is nothing more than “I know what’s best for me: what’s inside me is mine to do with as I please.” Is it really much of a stretch to follow that logic a step (or a few inches) further? That “I know what’s best for me: what was inside me and is now outside of me but totally dependent on me is mine to do with as I please”?
Actually, that extension has been made every few years for decades–see neonatal euthanasia or “after-birth abortion.” It comes and goes with varying levels of furious rebuttal and then vanishes, but not without further softening resistance in academic circles and in popular journals.
The best conclusion is to quote Mr. Wilcox:

There are only nine reasons, but no bother. Ms. Vawter claims she could have come up with a hundred more, but it would have been nice if she could have come up with a second good one [beyond danger to the life of the mother]. Abortion cannot be justified by situations because not only does it beg the question, but situations must be looked at on a situation by situation basis.

And ironically, as J. Warner Wallace points out, these reasons wouldn’t justify killing the cats in these pictures, so why should we justify abortion for these reasons? Have pets become more important to us than unborn children?

Source: NRLC News